Add floating point value to android resources/values

Question

I'm trying to add a little space between lines to my TextViews using android:lineSpacingMultiplier from the documentation:

Extra spacing between lines of text, as a multiplier.

Must be a floating point value, such as "1.2".

As I'm using this in a few different TextViews I would like to add a global dimension/value to my resources, but I don't know which tag to use, if it even exists. I have tried all resource types that make sense to me, but none of them works.

What I would like to have would be something like this:

<resources>
    <dimen name="text_line_spacing">1.4</dimen>
</resources>

Edit: I'm aware of android:lineSpacingExtra (which needs a dimension with an appended unit), but I'd like to use android:lineSpacingMultiplier if possible.

Answer 1

There is a solution:

<resources>
    <item name="text_line_spacing" format="float" type="dimen">1.0</item>
</resources>

In this way, your float number will be under @dimen. Notice that you can use other "format" and/or "type" modifiers, where format stands for:

Format = enclosing data type:

• float
• boolean
• fraction
• integer
• ...

and type stands for:

Type = resource type (referenced with R.XXXXX.name):

• color
• dimen
• string
• style
• etc...

To fetch resource from code, you should use this snippet:

TypedValue outValue = new TypedValue();
getResources().getValue(R.dimen.text_line_spacing, outValue, true);
float value = outValue.getFloat();  

I know that this is confusing (you'd expect call like getResources().getDimension(R.dimen.text_line_spacing)), but Android dimensions have special treatment and pure "float" number is not valid dimension.

---

Additionally, there is small "hack" to put float number into dimension, but be WARNED that this is really hack, and you are risking chance to lose float range and precision.

<resources>
    <dimen name="text_line_spacing">2.025px</dimen>
</resources>

and from code, you can get that float by

float lineSpacing = getResources().getDimension(R.dimen.text_line_spacing);

in this case, value of lineSpacing is 2.024993896484375, and not 2.025 as you would expected.